"I'll sue" is one of the most popular things
self-described hackers and hacker sympathizers say to threaten
us Happy Hacksters. We're beginning to think that some
people who call themselves hackers must be enemies of
free speech. They deface web sites and shut them down with
distributed denial of service attacks. These attacks violate
your freedom to use the web. So it should come as no surprise
that many "hackers" try to censor web sites by threatening
lawsuits.

The most hilarious threat came from lawyer Jennifer Granick,
representing Jay Dyson. She's threatening to sue us
because we commented on a story
in both the web and print versions of Forbes magazine. Hey, if
her client doesn't like the Forbes story, he should get her to
sue Forbes.

Our tutorial on social engineering
has inspired more threats to sue (and one wimpy
blackmail attempt) than anything else we've ever put
on this web site. The parts of the tutorial that have people
in such a sweat are:

A press relations person for Secure
Computing Corp. refused to tell Meinel what was libelous
about her social engineering tutorial. She simply verbally threatened
to sue.

Adam Penenberg of Forbes also refused to identify anything
that might be untrue about him, simply threatening
to sue.

Richard Thieme was not happy at all with Meinel reminding
people that he wrote many totally fanciful stories about Se7en,
even though he knew that Se7en was, shall we say, possessed of
a remarkable imagination. Click here
to see how Thieme tried (and failed) to persuade her to leave
him out of that story.

Bronc Buster (Erik Ginorio of Cisco)
tries to trick Meinel into believing he can get a restraining
order to prohibit her from reporting on him.